Chapter One: Death, Debt, Doubt

The first of the charau-ka died before he knew he was in danger.

The huntress had tracked the apes and the traitor from the kraal of the Imjaka, through towering boles and curtains of hanging vines; across mattresses of leaves and fungi-infested soils that greedily retained the prints of passersby. Those who had hunted alongside her had long since turned back, unwilling to press so far from home.

But she would not turn back. The traitor Okamsi had been her friend; that made the tribe’s vengeance her responsibility.

When she caught up to the baboon-faced, musk-and-feces-perfumed ape-things, they had halted beneath a thick canopy of branches, apparently arguing in their hooting, grunting language. They numbered three, which worried the huntress—not because she feared such odds, but because they had numbered five, plus Okamsi, when they’d first set out.

So where had the others gone?

She watched, wary of some snare or deception, but eventually the argument came to an end. The trio of charau-ka prepared to set out once more, and still no sign of the missing.

Time, then, to put her doubts aside.

Spears hissed through the canopy, shredding clusters of leaves. The first, a light and springy thing with a broad head of iron, sank into the back of the first ape-man, followed almost instantly by the second. Spears three and four were in the air, seeking fresh targets, before the perforated charau-ka had crumpled to the loam.

Hooting and screeching, the remaining simian warriors leapt aside, allowing the missiles to sink harmlessly into the earth. Hauling thick, knotted cudgels from the leather harnesses that were their only garb, they spun to face their unseen attacker. One slammed his club to the earth, shrieking in challenge. The other leapt for the branches, dangling by one hand and one prehensile foot, sniffing at the air.

Fleet as the jaguar, agile as the gibbon, the huntress leapt from the cover of the trees. She was a lithe, wiry figure, her skin darker and richer than the fertile soils on which she stood, marred only by the faded scars of an old burn spread unevenly across her left shoulder and her neck. Other than the white of her eyes and teeth, the only brighter hue in either her garb or her complexion came from a lion-skin kilt, partially slit so as not to impede her steps. From a belt of cowhide hung her quiver of throwing spears, and a pair of empty sheaths.

In each hand she held the former occupants of those sheaths: her faithful mambeles, wicked crescents of iron, almost like sickles with extra blades protruding at all angles.

She was taller than the charau-ka, but she had seen the strength and ferocity of the foul creatures before and knew better than to be fooled by their size. For an endless instant, human and charau-ka locked burning, unblinking eyes. Then they were coming at her. Their shrieks grew higher until they were a fire in the ears, and they crossed the intervening distance—whether afoot or swinging from the heavy branches—with a speed that astonished even the experienced Imjaka huntress.

Astonished—but not dismayed.

The huntress let fly, sending a mambele whistling through the air as she dove. Leaves and mushrooms crunched, the latter emitting a pungent and unhealthy smell as she rolled on one shoulder, passing just beneath the reach of the tree-borne charau-ka’s bludgeon.

Her second enemy, though still roaring his fury, had jerked to a halt at the impact of the many-pointed weapon. It protruded from his chest—not deep enough to reach anything vital, but agonizing enough.

The forward tumble brought her back to her feet—or rather, to her knees, ending in a crouch before her diminutive foe. She yanked the mambele from his chest, twisting to widen the wound. That second jolt of pain, in turn, bought her enough time to bring her arms—and her blades—together across his throat.

“Ameyanda fears no man or beast, but only a fool ventures into the Sodden Lands.”

Both mambeles, one already blooded, the other pristine, dug through simian fur and flesh. First a gout of the charau-ka’s blood spattered across the earth, followed by his weapon—and then the charau-ka itself.

Hanging now by his feet, the surviving simian hurled a pair of stones, produced from spirits-knew-where. The huntress knocked the first aside with a desperate backhand, iron blade sparking on the jagged rock, but she’d no way to avoid the second. All she could do was rise from her crouch so that she took the stone against leather-warded chest rather than unprotected head.

Dyed the crimson-brown of drying blood, the jerkin was boiled and hardened to turn aside spears and arrows, yet she felt her flesh bruise, her rib shuddering but thankfully not cracking with the impact.

She needed to close, fast. Fortunately, the damn monkey’s acrobatics and elevation didn’t give him nearly the advantage he anticipated.

Again the mambele flew, followed swiftly by the second. The charau-ka swung aside on one foot, allowing both blades to sink harmlessly into the wood; but then, she’d known full well that he would.

In the brief seconds of his dodge, the huntress broke into a run and leapt. Hands calloused by a life in the wilds of the Mwangi Expanse closed around the rough bark. Even as the charau-ka spun back her way, she swung forward, wrapping her calves around the creature’s torso just below his arms. A sharp twist of the waist was enough to shake the bough and, more significantly, yank the ape-man from his perch to land headfirst on the jungle floor.

It wasn’t much of a fall, not nearly enough to kill. No, it was the woman landing on him even as he bounded upright, both mambeles once more in her hands and angled sharply downward, that did the trick.

Silence, then, save for the huntress’s sharp breaths. Still alert for the missing charau-ka, she carefully cleaned her blades on the creature’s hairy hide before sheathing them. She then made her way to the spears, jutting from soil or flesh, retrieving those that might be reused, salvaging the iron tips from those that could not.

“If you seek the human, you will not find him.”

She spun to face the thick screen of foliage from which the voice had come. It had an odd sound to it: raspy, slightly mangled, as though spoken by someone unaccustomed to the regional dialect.

Or, she realized when the figure stepped into the open, by a mouth that was never meant to pronounce the words.

He stood perhaps a head taller than she. Scales the murky green of stagnant swamp water faded gradually into a sallow tan across his throat and chest. A crest of similarly colored spines ran from atop his head to the base of his tail. He wore only an open vest and loincloth of some mammalian hide, but his eyes gleamed with cunning and the black talons of one hand were wrapped around a feather-and-bone-bedecked spear.

It was only as she completed her fleeting inspection that she realized she had no way of knowing if “he” was in fact male. She’d just assumed, perhaps due to the voice.

Her own hands lingered near the mambeles, but if the newcomer was hostile, he could have struck from concealment. Warily, she straightened and ran a hand over the prickly stubble that was the only hair atop her scalp. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“I have watched these charau-ka since before midday. They met earlier with one of the great speaking gorillas of Usaro. A wizard, surely, for it disappeared soon after, taking two of the charau-ka and a human with it. They may be anywhere now, perhaps even Usaro itself. As you clearly track them, I assume it is the human you seek?”

She growled something she hoped, afterward, the reptile wouldn’t be able to translate. “Yes, damn it. It is.”

The lizardman nodded, though whether the gesture meant the same thing coming from him as it would from her, she was unsure.

“I am Ameyanda,” she said, remembering at least a sliver of etiquette while the bulk of her attention was focused on figuring out what she was supposed to do now. “Of the Imjaka.”

“Seyusth, of Haa-Ok. And I know you already, Ameyanda of Imjaka.”

“Grandmother Sun’s blessings on—what? You know me?”

“I know you, yes. I am, in fact, seeking you, not those.” He gestured with an empty hand toward the apish corpses.

“Why?” Her own hand edged again toward her weapons.

“I seek one of my clan, my…” He paused, blinking languidly, perhaps trying to recall the proper word, or to explain a concept that didn’t translate. “‘Cousin,’ is the nearest term in your language. You will help me retrieve him.”

“Is that so? Seyusth, not only have I my own hunt to—”

“You cannot find your missing human any time soon. You have no means of tracking him.”

“Not only have I my own hunt,” she repeated through a cage of clenched teeth, “but why, by all the gods, would I involve myself in yours?”

“Because, Ameyanda of the Imjaka, you owe me your life.”

A pause; a blink; a breath.

“Oh. You’re that lizardman.”

∗∗∗

Ameyanda had no difficulty remembering. She still dreamed about it.

She felt the crunch of twigs and fungi beneath her feet, saw the trees and fronds whipping by to either side, heard her own desperate gasps echoed in the panting of Mbamsi and Entandwi. She gagged as the ominous musk—not quite reptile and not quite avian, but distilled from the worst of both—seeped malevolently into those breaths, as if taunting. And she heard the cracking and snapping, hissing and spitting, as the pack closed far, far too rapidly from behind. They were smaller than most of the predatory thunder-lizards of the Mwangi, those raptors, but they were large enough, fierce enough, and horrifyingly cunning enough to take down prey far stronger than the three Imjaka youths. They’d already lost Xabadzi to the raptors’ initial ambush.

Ameyanda and her friends would follow him soon enough.

Or they would have, had the grasses themselves not come to the rescue. Wiggling like serpents, they intertwined with the pounding talons of the raptors. Yanked to a halt, some so swiftly that they toppled, the thunder-lizards began to slash and chew at the suddenly hostile flora.

They might, perhaps, have gnawed themselves free soon enough, but the trio’s fortune had not yet run out. From a sky largely bereft of clouds, the lightning cracked. When the first of the raptors was seared, shrieking in pain, the others redoubled their efforts. By the time the third had suffered the same agonizing fate, the rest wanted nothing more than to be elsewhere. Finally ripping themselves free, the surviving members of pack scattered, their prey forgotten.

For a moment, as Ameyanda had turned, wide-eyed, toward Mbamsi and Entandwi, she caught a glimpse of one of the mysterious lizardfolk, deep in the jungle’s shadows. Ameyanda knew little about magic, then, but she knew that what she’d witnessed had in no way been natural. Tentatively, she raised a hand in greeting.

Her reptilian savior had solemnly returned the gesture before vanishing into the trees.

∗∗∗

Ameyanda dragged her mind across the intervening half-decade and back to the figure she’d never thought to see again.

“I owe you,” she admitted, her voice low. “And the Imjaka repay our debts.”

“Good,” was all Seyusth offered in reply.

Stifling a sigh, the huntress went to retrieve the woven satchel of supplies that she’d left in the hollow of a winding tree root before engaging the charau-ka. “You could explain yourself, at least,” she suggested sourly. “Why come to me? Could the other Haa-Ok not—?”

“My people have no desire to assist me. Our journey may take us into the territories of the Terwa Lords.”

“And those are who?”

“The…” Again, Seyusth seemed briefly at a loss. “What is your term for my kind?”

“Your…? Oh. Ah, ‘lizardfolk.’”

His snout twitched as though he’d just swallowed something that had decided to bite back. “Yes. The ‘lizardfolk’ of the western swamps are not like Haa-Ok, or our neighboring tribes. They are fiercer. More bloodthirsty.”

Ameyanda hefted the satchel over her shoulder. “We’ve had trouble with lizardfolk raids now and then. Them?”

“Most probably. The Terwa Lords—those who rule the swamp tribes—seek expansion and conquest. They have attempted, at times, to annex even tribes far into the Mwangi, either through promise or threat. The former emptier than the latter, I think.”

“They’re your enemies,” she said. “And your tribesmen—uh, tribeslizards?—will not risk invading their lands over one missing person.”

“You understand precisely. I attempted to locate Issisk—the missing one—myself, but my knowledge of the region proved insufficient. It cost me an entire moon of wasted effort.”

Ameyanda was frowning, tapping a hand idly against her quiver. “I’m a skilled warrior,” she said without braggadocio, “and I’ve seen your power… shaman?”

“As accurate a term as any.”

“But I don’t believe the two of us can fight an entire nation, Seyusth.”

“You misunderstand. While we may pass through their territories, the Terwa do not have Issisk. If he lives, he is in the hands of the swamp’s savage humans.”

The satchel fell back to the soil with a dull thump. “You mean the scavenger gangs,” she hissed, a fair imitation of a reptile herself. “When you say ‘the western swamps’… You mean to take us into the Sodden Lands.”

“If that is what you call the storm-drowned territories beyond the jungle’s edge,” the lizardman told her, “then yes.”

Chapter Two: Murky Waters

“I know that the Imjaka, dwelling so near those reaches, have made a greater study of these ‘scavenger gangs’ than I,” Seyusth continued. “That, Ameyanda, is why I come to you, though finding you proved far from simple.”

This time, Ameyanda didn’t bother to suppress her sigh. “All right,” she said, once more hefting her pack. “Lead the way, shaman, and tell me what you know.”

Seyusth spoke of his travails as they began to walk, and the huntress—so far as her exertions allowed—listened.

“It was over half a moon,” he explained, “before we realized that the hunting patrol was overdue. Another moon, and more, before I could make my own apprentice ready to see to Haa-Ok’s needs during my prolonged absence. And then, as I told you, almost another moon still before I finally tracked down the remains of Issisk’s band.”

“Remains?” If this lizard is hauling me into the Sodden Lands to retrieve a body…

“A smattering of parts, not entirely rotted into the soil. No intact bodies, and no remaining tracks. So I spoke a time with the serpents and birds and toads of the area.”

“Of course. Who wouldn’t?”

“It was then I learned that Issisk was led away in chains, the others slain and their bodies taken. And I learned that the attackers were not my people but humans, both living and unliving.”

Ameyanda staggered to a halt, her skin breaking out in goosebumps despite the sapping heat. She swallowed hard. “Unliving? Your cousin was taken by the dead-who-walk?” She’d never faced such horrors herself, but the folklore of her people was rife with them.

“Alongside the living, yes.”

She felt her lips moving in silence. Seyusth watched her, unblinking.

“Does this pose a problem for you?” he asked finally.

“A problem? I think this is a bit more severe than a ‘problem’!” Still, it was enough to stiffen her resolve. She’d almost announced that she was going back, but no.

The Imjaka repay our debts. Ameyanda would not be the one to violate that tradition, no matter what.

Especially not when that one detail—the presence of the dead-who-walk—was indeed sufficient to suggest to her which of the savenger gangs they sought.

The White Leech. Grandmother Sun, help us…

“Seyusth is a powerful shaman, but woefully ignorant regarding the Sodden Lands.”

“All right, shaman. Follow me; I know who you’re searching for.”

They trekked beneath shrouding canopies of leaves and low-hanging lianas, over fallen logs and rotten fungi, through brambles and ferns glistening with condensation and sticky secretions. Seyusth slipped through without effort; thorns and foliage ran off him like water. Ameyanda, for all her skill, had a harder time. More than one scrape or sting brought a grunted curse, and her resentful gaze on the lizardman’s back nearly set his vest to smoldering.

Embarrassment, more than pain, chafed her. It had been many years since Ameyanda had required anyone else to slow their passage through even the wildest jungle.

“You are certain this White Leech is the band we seek?” Seyusth asked.

“They’re the only border scavengers who make use of the dead-who-walk. Rumor and tales have it that their chieftain, Montirro the Thrice-Blind, learned his necromancies from the Koboto people themselves.”

“I had heard that the Koboto sacrifice anyone who nears their lands.”

“True.”

“Then how—?”

Ameyanda shrugged. “As I said, rumor and tales. But that the White Leech raises the dead is no mere tale. I know warriors who have seen it themselves.”

“But can you be certain the White Leech is the only such band?” he pressed.

“As certain as you can be that Issisk still lives.”

The following miles passed without further conversation.

∗∗∗

They crossed no border. No fences, no signposts; no mighty river or towering escarpment marked the transition.

The trees grew sparser, their roots and branches more crooked. Fern leaves and winding briars gave way to hanging mosses and slender reeds. The lush scent of loam and sprouting things wafted away beneath the odor of rot and stagnant pools.

The mud grew thicker, more greedy as it tugged at scaled or sandal-wrapped heels. Worse, it became vaguely caustic, just enough to cause irritation and a sanity-threatening itch.

By the time they’d passed beyond the mud flats into the swamp proper, the filthy, lukewarm water was almost a relief.

This far from the sea and the eternal hurricane dubbed the Eye of Abendego, the Sodden Lands were indeed simply a swamp, if a swamp with abnormally deep patches and river-like currents. Ameyanda knew that the further west they progressed, the worse it would become. Mires of impossible size, plague-bearing floodwaters as deep as any lake, a barrage of wind and rain so constant as to wear down the heaviest stone.

They shouldn’t have to go so far—to the huntress’s knowledge, the White Leech operated primarily here in the outskirts—but even this was far from pleasant.

When the shallow marsh began to develop waves high enough to slap at her chest, and a tepid, breath-like gust began to herald the promise of rain, Ameyanda pulled a face and reached out to stop her companion in his tracks. Already she had to raise her voice to be heard over the building winds.

“We’re not going much farther in this without a raft of some sort,” she told him, running a hand through the stubble on her scalp. It itched, and retained a surprising amount of water, but she hadn’t had the opportunity to shave her head in days.

Seyusth stepped aside to haul a thick vine from a nearby cypress. “Use this to secure yourself.”

“Secure myself to wh-augh!”

Ameyanda leapt backward, splashing murky water in all directions, as the shaman shifted. One moment, a lizardman; the next, over the span of seconds, his limbs drew into his body and thickened, his torso elongated, his snout lengthened. His pebbly flesh bulged in some spots, smoothed in others.

Lurking in the water, eyes and nostrils protruding menacingly, was a full-sized crocodile.

“Warn me before you do that!”

The crocodile, in a very familiar and languid expression, blinked.

“You can’t speak when you’ve turned yourself into an animal?”

Blink.

“Oh.” Ameyanda stepped forward—less gingerly than she felt—looped the vine around the reptile’s chest, and climbed aboard. Not the most comfortable mount, but it must beat walking.

After hours of being tossed about by the beast’s wriggling swim, her arms and legs bruised raw against its knobby hide and savaged mercilessly by vermin both above the water and below, she wasn’t so sure of that anymore.

Early the following day—not that one could tell it was day, given that the pounding rains still hadn’t moved on—Seyusth apparently scented or detected something. With an abrupt twitch that nearly unseated his partner, the crocodile shot through the swamps on a new course.

Ameyanda, who knew that asking him what they were doing was a waste of time and breath, instead wasted that same time and breath in a litany of curses.

A reed-covered hillock was their destination. Seyusth had barely climbed atop the rise before shifting back into his natural shape. Anyone with lesser reflexes than the huntress would have been sent sprawling.

“You have some steed etiquette to master,” she groused at him. “Why—?”

“There.” Black talons pushed a tuft of reeds so she could see. “Are those White Leech?”

In what amounted to a wide corridor of swamp hemmed in by cypress walls, a pair of skiffs moved sluggishly across the water. The wood of the haphazard vessels was stained with old blood—old and dry enough that the rain washed absolutely none of it away. The men aboard were clad in tatters and leather scraps, held together by everything from cowhide straps to sodden twine, and armed with roughly hammered and sharpened scrap metal. One man poled each of the skiffs, while the others argued over the choicest cuts of… something that had once drawn breath.

“Difficult to tell,” Ameyanda told him, struggling to peer through the downpour. “We’re in their territory, but I wouldn’t know how to tell the White Leech by sight. They… No,” she said with sudden certainty. “They’re not White Leech.”

“How do you know?”

“Because,” she said, pointing at the ominous shapes suddenly looming from the corridor of trees, or rising from beneath the swamp to surround the skiffs and their frantic crew, “I’m fairly sure those are the White Leech.”

They seemed no more than phantoms, obscured by the downpour. Some of the silhouettes that formed from within the trees, or from deep within the murky waters, appeared humanoid. Others were most assuredly nothing of the kind.

That the first group they’d spotted were thrown into utter panic by the arrival of the second was clear enough, but precisely who the newcomers were, or what about them was so horrifying, neither the brown-skinned huntress nor the green-scaled shaman could see.

The feeblest remnants of what might have been shouts or screams drifted through the downpour.

“We must get nearer!” Seyusth yelled in her ear.

“How wise of you, great shaman,” Ameyanda retorted with bitter sarcasm. “And how do you suggest we…” But the lizardman had already dived into the choppy swamp.

“Spirit-damned lizard,” she hissed at the fading ripples. He’d retained his natural shape, but even so, Ameyanda knew she couldn’t match his speed in the water. Still grumbling under her breath, she hung her quiver of spears across the thickest reeds—the weapons would just float away anyway—checked that both mambeles were snug in their sheathes, and waded reluctantly into the waters.

Even over the course of only a few dozen paces, the treacherous mud, the submerged and rotting logs, and the abnormal waves conspired to constantly alter the depth of the swamp. At times she was submerged to the waist; at others, the crests of those waves passed over her head, slapping her across the face with filthy water and reeking algae. Still, she preferred to wade, though she was a strong swimmer; she wanted to keep her feet under her and her eyes at least mostly clear.

She finally clambered once more onto a solid surface—a floating tussock of sticks, moss, and mud—and spent a moment gasping for breath, coughing up water, and trying with all her might to strangle the lizardman with her eyes. “Some of us,” she began, “do not swim like—”

“Look.”

Whatever protests remained died in Amayanda’s throat.

One of the primitive skiffs had already been overturned, partly smashed to kindling by a reptilian juggernaut of flaking scales and protruding bone. Two more crocodiles—though these two were alive—had surfaced alongside the undead monstrosity to snap at men in the water. Nearby, bobbing almost peacefully in the currents and waves, five of the dead-who-walk, naked and sloughing waterlogged flesh, advanced on the remaining raft.

Beyond those, the huntress could begin to make out the details of the larger force emerging from the tree line. A skiff of prodigious size, stained white, led the way, followed by two of more traditional girth. The men standing on those skiffs, hooting worse than the charau-ka and waving rusted blades overhead, wore leather armor clearly formed from a wide variety of creatures. Not a single greave, spaulder, or breastplate matched any other, and while some were obviously crafted from the tanned hides of swamp beasts—crocodiles and great snakes, primarily—others appeared mammalian and even, on occasion, humanoid in origin. A few of the latter still sported locks of hair, flapping wildly in the rain.

At the forefront, bellowing to shame an enraged elephant, was the most monstrous man—if man he was—Ameyanda had ever seen. Easily half again as tall as she and monstrously obese, he must have outweighed any three of the others put together. Rolls of fat, maggot-pale and glistening with rainwater, bulged from between the slapdash components of his armor. He carried a hammer, its head large enough for a halfling to have used as an anvil, waving it about with apparent ease. His head and jaw seemed subtly misshapen, but that could have been an illusion of distance, combined with his straggly, sickly hair—thinning up front, hanging to his shoulder blades behind.

That mass of flesh and his smaller allies blocked Ameyanda’s sight of whoever or whatever poled the skiff from the rear, but it shot forward with startling speed, seeming to crush the waves before it. Already they were near enough to their victims for the most lithe of the White Leech warriors to leap from one raft to the other.

“We,” Seyusth announced suddenly, a gleam in his golden eyes, “could certainly do with local allies. The enemy of my enemy, as your people say…”

Had Ameyanda not been so astonished, so horrified and repulsed, by the blasphemies of the White Leech—had she not still been trying to gather her breath—she might have stopped him. As it was, by the time she registered what he was doing, it was already too late.

“Seyusth! Damn it!”

The shaman rose, arms held high. The combatants might not have noticed his appearance, distracted as they were, until the first of the lightning bolts roared from the heavens.

Several of the White Leech fell to the deck of the skiff or into the ever-hungry waters, their bodies blackened. Their gelatinous mountain of a leader recoiled, one arm raised to protect his face. The skin along that arm, and across his gut, turned red, then black, but he hardly seemed to notice.

Almost immediately, every eye present scanned their surroundings and fixed on Seyusth. Though the attack had not come from him directly, nobody was stupid enough to think the stroke a coincidence.

The lizardman opened his mouth, perhaps to shout something to the men he’d meant to rescue, when the entire mass of humanity and undead—including those whom the White Leech had just been slaughtering—began shoving their rafts through the water, closing on the startled shaman.

“The scavenger gangs,” Ameyanda hissed through heaving breaths, “always band together against outsiders!”

“I see…”

“Get us out of here!”

Seysuth stepped to the far side of the floating tussock, presumably to once again assume his own crocodile form and carry them beyond the reach of the slower skiffs.

The undead crocodile erupted from the swamp like a breaching whale.

The snout, a battering ram of dead scales, rotting flesh, and stained bone, slammed the shaman backward to land sprawled, half in the swamp. It spun, its jaws a gaping pit to the Abyss. The overwhelming miasma of decay, to say nothing of the sprayed droplets of liquefying muscle, nearly paralyzed the Imjaka warrior.

Nearly.

Ameyanda leapt from the quivering mass of vegetation, tucking her knees high, just barely clearing the oncoming snout. Crying aloud, she kicked down with both legs, slamming the jaws together and down into the tussock. Now crouched atop the shambling horror, she drove both mambeles deep into its flesh.

Muscle tore; bone splintered; chipped teeth flew to land scattered amidst the twigs. For a living creature, a fatal blow.

For the unliving crocodile, an inconvenience.

“Seyusth!” She stepped off the mangled snout, blades raised. “I could do with some—”

The sound of splashing water, thrashing limbs, and the impact of something on roughened flesh suggested that the shaman had his own problems.

The crocodile snapped, attempting to skewer her with the edge of a broken jaw. Ameyanda backpedaled, seeking any escape, and glanced over her shoulder just in time to see Seyusth fall.

A handful of the dead-who-walk had followed their crocodilian ally through the waters and clambered atop the floating isle. One lay, truly dead, lacerated by the shaman’s spear; another had been brought down by a second lightning bolt from on high. But even as Seyusth turned to handle a third, a head broke the surface of the swamp—a humanoid head not mammalian, but reptilian.

Seyusth froze, his whole expression slack. Ameyanda could only assume he was trying to tell if the unliving thing was the missing Issisk. And in that moment of distraction, one of the White Leech leapt from the skiff—gods and spirits, how did that ponderous vessel move so swiftly?—and slammed a thick cudgel into the lizardman’s skull.

A cudgel… yet he carried a serrated falchion in his other hand.

Ameyanda saw the grin of the monstrous fat man, the clubs and ropes held by his fellows, and knew they had something far worse than a quick death in mind.

Chapter Three: Over Their Heads

The undead crocodile lashed out with its tail now, rather than its mangled jaw, and Ameyanda could not entirely avoid the blow. She staggered almost to the edge of the wobbling—and now disintegrating—tussock.

For an instant, she seriously considered drawing a mambele across her own throat. Considered, and dismissed.

If they keep me alive, that’s their mistake.

Still, she’d prefer not to leave herself helpless. Again she cast about, desperate for any advantage…

And saw it, almost buried in the muck and sticks.

The White Leech who’d struck down Seyusth was moving in on her, again with club rather than blade raised. Even through the rain, the sour reek of old sweat, rotting teeth, and poorly tanned hides was worse than the undead.

She let the club come, raising crossed mambeles to parry only at the last instant, allowing the blow to send her sprawling.

Oh, Grandmother Sun, this is going to hurt!

Agony, white hot and piercing, as her hand came down upon the tiny prize she’d noted a moment earlier. It was crippling, nauseating; her whole body spasmed, and she could feel the object shifting inside the flesh of her palm.

But they wouldn’t find it there, and the rain should wash away the worst of the blood before the enemy could grow suspicious.

Racked by pain, Ameyanda didn’t have to fake helplessness as the White Leech swarmed over her, confiscating her weapons and tying her arms with rough hemp before dropping her like a sack of tubers into the massive skiff.

∗∗∗

She didn’t pass out precisely, but the wash of pain, exacerbated by the rough handling, smothered her mind in a thick caul. It was some moments before she once more became aware of her surroundings.

She shivered, and realized that she lay in water two fingers deep—accumulation from the rain. She was lying on the deck of the skiff, which was now surging through the swamp with that unnatural speed she’d noticed earlier.

And now she saw how.

Clamped to the rear corners of the raft with thick iron spikes, a pair of undead torsos worked effortlessly and tirelessly with heavy poles to keep the craft in motion. Someone had taken a few sizable bites of excess flesh out of one of the torso’s shoulders.

Swallowing bile, she scooted to look around. To her right lay one of the men the White Leech had attacked, also bound. Apparently hostilities had resumed after the mutual enemy was down. He sported fresh bite wounds, and was already shivering with fever.

Instinctively, she glanced down at her stomach and legs, searching for similar bites.

“You will not find any,” breathed a weak voice from her left. “The obese one did that to him in battle, not after capture.”

“Seyusth?” She twisted and flopped to face her companion. “Are you—oh, gods and spirits!”

“It appears,” the lizardman said, “that the White Leech has experience countering a shaman’s magics.”

A pair of small logs had been lashed together with leather straps and hemp, forming a rough T.

And to that, Seyusth had been crucified.

A squared metal stake pinned both feet to the heavy branch. Each arm was nailed down with a length of iron curved in a rough U, penetrating palms and wrists both. Ugly, primitive sigils, etched in corrosion and flaking rust, wound in uneven spirals around the spikes.

No spellcasting, not without his hands. And no shape-changing, presumably, not pinned as he was. Amayanda needed no eldritch knowledge to sense the magics, cold and sickly, emanating from that profane iron.

She couldn’t help him. All she could offer was the courtesy of not asking something stupid like, “Are you all right?”

Instead, she asked, “What do we know?”

“Galgur the Gullet always has room for one more prisoner.”

Seyusth took a few deep breaths before answering. “Their leader is the big one. The men call him ‘Galgur the Gullet.’ From what little I overheard, while he may answer to the White Leech chieftain…”

“Montirro the Thrice-Blind,” Ameyanda reminded him.

“Yes. He may answer to this Montirro, but not often. His band controls this region of White Leech domain with relative autonomy.”

“Good. I thought we were in trouble there, for a moment.”

The lizardman couldn’t muster a laugh, but his snout pulled back from his teeth in what Ameyanda assumed was a polite grin.

“Issisk?” she asked after a moment’s pause.

“Not here. I never saw the unliving one close, but he appeared the wrong build to be Issisk.”

Ameyanda nodded, shifted without thinking, then gasped at the renewed pain.

“I am sorry,” Seyusth told her.

“It’s not as though I could expect you to rush to help me,” she said, struggling for a light tone.

“No. It is my fault you are here. My fault either of us had to be here.”

“How is that, precisely?” This was starting to sound disturbingly like a deathbed confession—did lizardfolk do that?—but Ameyanda hardly cared what he was saying. As long as he kept speaking, he was conscious; as long as he was conscious, he wasn’t dead.

“Years ago, emissaries of the Terwa Lords approached us. They wanted Haa-Ok to serve them, as a—a stepping stone—in Mwangi. I opposed this, as did many others. To join with the Terwa would be to betray our traditions, our heritage; to become something the world never intended of us. But I was merely an apprentice shaman, and my protests carried little weight. My mentor, Errash, supported the alliance. Further, he claimed the spirits of the Expanse supported it as well.”

Seyusth’s words were coming slower, now, between heaving, labored breaths. “After several moons of debate and consideration, Haa-Ok sent some of our own to announce our assent to the Terwa Lords. The band was led by Hasseth, our greatest warrior, as a sign of respect. I was to go with them as well, to offer what magical protections I could along the way.

“I proved insufficient. Perhaps we took too long for the Terwa’s liking? Perhaps they had some other plot. We never knew. We were attacked along the way; only I survived, due to my magics, and then only barely. But worse, when I finally made my way home, I found that Errash had been slain in his sleep! No agent of the Terwa should have proved able to infiltrate our home, murder our shaman, and depart undetected!

“It could only mean that the spirits had removed their protections from him. They could not, after all, favor such a hideous alliance. Some good came from the catastrophe, then, for while a few of my people still argue, even to this day, to join the Terwa, most are wise enough to heed the spirits’ signs.”

Seyusth lapsed into a fit of coughing, which in turn tugged at the spikes and set his wounds bleeding anew. Several of the men up front glanced their way, attracted by the sudden spasm. A few laughed; one flicked his tongue in and out, like a reptile.

“How does that make what happened to Issisk your fault?” she insisted. Keep talking. Stay awake…

“I… After becoming shaman to Haa-Ok, I spoke long about the evils of the Terwa Lords and those who follow them. And many of our youth took those lessons deeply to heart. We sent hunting bands far from our territories, in part, to patrol against Terwa incursion from the Sodden Lands. And Issisk’s band… I found them well beyond their accustomed terrain. I fear they went looking for the enemy, and it was this that brought them to the White Leech.”

“And we’re so delighted it did!”

The voice was soft—not with kindness, but like a smothering pillow—and high as a young girl’s. Ameyanda looked up at the obese bulk that now kept much of the rain from her skin; she could not even imagine how a body that fleshy could approach so quietly. Or without rocking the entire skiff.

He squatted so that the jiggling of his thighs threatened to slap against their feet. Ameyanda could smell not merely sweat, but mildew and the seepage of open sores.

She could see, too, the cause of his misshapen jaw. His teeth had been removed and replaced, via foreign magics or surgeries, with twin ridges of serrated bone.

As much to keep from gagging as anything else, Ameyanda spoke. “‘Delighted’? Why?”

Galgur ignored the question. “Did we hear,” he asked Seyusth, “that you dislike the Terwa lizards? Oh, that’s really too bad, since we’ll be trading you to them. Not for a while, though. We’ve a friend who would dearly love to speak with you first!”

The shaman hissed, deep in his throat.

“And you two…” He turned to Ameyanda and the other captive. “We’ll put you in the swamp for a time. You’ll be so much more succulent after you’ve softened and ripened!”

It wasn’t the laughter and cheers of the White Leech that sent a shiver through Ameyanda’s spine, but the string of anticipatory drool that dangled from Galgur the Gullet’s maw.

∗∗∗

The village had been built in part on a gentle hillside. It had probably been beautiful, pastoral gardens and fields of crops. But that was before the coming of the eternal storm.

Now most of it was permanently submerged, the wooden buildings rotted to skeletons of what they’d been. A few, however, stood tall enough, and high enough on the hill, that a story or two protruded from the swamp. These, too, harbored the restless stench of decay and rough smears of various molds. Still, with the use of uncountable patches and slapdash repairs, they remained good enough for some.

Galgur’s faction of the White Leech called them home.

They’d approached the hillside through a veritable thicket of peculiar reeds. Protruding stiffly, reaching almost a man’s height above the waters, they didn’t appear remotely natural to their surroundings.

And now Ameyanda knew why.

“We’ll put you in the swamp for a time. You’ll be so much more succulent after you’ve softened and ripened!”

Despite her best efforts, or the shame it brought, she’d finally panicked. First the bag, yanked over her head and sealed around the neck with some viscous sludge. It smelled of light tanning and animal fat, and it had one of those long reeds—long, hollow reeds—protruding from one side.

And then she’d felt herself manhandled, strapped by leather cords to a heavy log, and tossed in to lie amidst the others.

They didn’t even mean to kill her first. Let her lie, submerged in the marsh, half-buried in muck, until her waterlogged skin came loose on her flesh. Only then, she knew, would they haul her up—a primitive rope-and-pulley system dangled from an overhanging cypress branch—to feast.

So yes, as the world went away save for the sound of the torpid waters beyond the bag and the patter of rain on the surface, gradually slowing as the squall finally passed, she’d thrashed, bucked, screamed in panic.

But only for a moment.

No large animals, was her first rational thought. Galgur and his men wouldn’t want anything to rob them of a meal, so they must have some means of keeping the bigger predators away from their “crop.” Nets in the water, perhaps. It meant there was nothing—well, nothing large enough to kill her outright—to be attracted by the blood.

And there would be a lot of blood.

Ameyanda pulled her left wrist toward her shoulder, as far as the straps would allow—and then kept pulling. For minutes beyond count, she pressed the ball of her hand against the leather, against the soft wood of the log. The pain was enough to draw another scream. So be it; let them think she howled in terror, if they could hear at all through the breathing reed.

She pushed; she twisted. And slowly, agonizingly, the jagged crocodile tooth—one she’d knocked from the unliving creature’s mouth, the thing she’d deliberately fallen upon and concealed within her own meat—slid from her skin.

She’d expected that she might need to free herself of bonds; she’d never begun to imagine the circumstances in which that need would arise.

Her fingers seized up, twitching, and she almost dropped it. The breath caught in her throat as she bobbled at it, and she almost cried in relief when she once more held it firm. The hand was weak, limp with pain and a growing infection she could already feel.

But it would do. It had to do.

In tiny twitches, Ameyanda began to run the edge of the tooth over the leather, again and again.

∗∗∗

“I know what you did.”

It was hearing his own language, more than the words themselves, that yanked Seyusth awake through the fog of pain. The room smelled of rotten wood, and as he pried his eyes open, he could see huge blotches of mold and water damage on the walls.

The room was also at a slight angle—no, he was at a slight angle. They hadn’t even bothered to stand the stake to which he was crucified straight up; just leaned it in the corner.

And then full awareness finally flooded through him, and he lowered his gaze to the one who’d addressed him.

“Issisk! Leaves and scales, you live!”

The younger lizardfolk stood in the chamber’s open doorway, perhaps a bit scrawnier than Seyusth recalled, but healthy enough. He nodded once, but otherwise offered no response.

“They allow you to move freely?” Seyusth asked.

“Largely. They keep eyes on me, to ensure I do not attempt to leave, but otherwise I do as I will.”

“A strange sort of imprisonment.”

“And what makes you believe I am a prisoner, Seyusth?”

It was, somehow, shocking to the core of his soul and the precise answer he’d anticipated, both at once. “I don’t understand. Issisk, why—?”

“They needed another of our people,” Issisk said, his voice oddly flat, even for a reptile. “They grew accustomed to having one of us work alongside them, to serve as spy in Terwa territory, or negotiator with their patrols, or scout who could swim farther than any human.”

“Accustomed to…” Seyusth was feeling dizzy, and not only from his wounds or the precarious angle.

“The one who had been with them was dying. They were hunting our kind when they came across my patrol. I was the fortunate survivor, and I chose cooperation over consumption. And I had some time to converse with my tribesmate before he died of his illness.”

“Who… Who was…?”

“I thought you would never ask.”

Issisk stepped aside, and a second lizardman strode—no, shambled—through the door. The dull scales and gaping holes were sufficient to tell Seyusth that this was the undead who had attacked him in the swamp.

But this near, he could also see details he’d missed at the time—including a face that, though partially worn away, he recognized.

“Oh, spirits. Hasseth…”

“As I said, murderer,” the younger one hissed, “I know what you did.”

Chapter Four: In the Lair of the White Leech

“Which one’s the Gullet want?”

“Don’t think he cares, long as it ain’t one of the new ones. Someone been in there at least a few days.”

The two warriors—muscle-bound, covered in scars of both battle and pestilence—waded into the waters, making for the stump from which the pulley could be operated.

“What about that gussied-up Shackles pirate we took? He oughta be about ripe by now, yeah?”

“Yeah, what is he? Two down, four over?” The White Leech reached for the mildewed rope, tugged—and nothing happened. A puzzled glance upward, and he could just barely make out an amorphous shape in the darkness, perched on the block-and-tackle.

“Hey, what—!”

The blood-smeared tooth wasn’t much of a weapon, and her left hand was all but useless. But when Ameyanda dropped upon the first of her captors, a feral snarl erupting through bared teeth, it made no difference.

∗∗∗

“Issisk…” Somehow, though the iron stakes allowed little range of movement, Seyusth seemed to slump. “You must understand—”

“Understand? Understand that you murdered your own cohort on your journey to the Terwa? That you snuck back to Haa-Ok and killed Errash, your own mentor, before skulking home with your tales of ambush? You never knew Hasseth survived, did you?”

“I—”

“He ran, Seyusth. The greatest warrior of Haa-ok, and he fled. He thought that, because it was you who tried to kill him, it must have been the will of the shaman. It was not until I spoke to him, in his dying days, and told him that Errash had also been murdered, and the lies you spun of what had occurred, that he knew it was you alone who had betrayed him. Betrayed us!”

“Issisk, listen! Errash wanted the alliance for his own gain, not because the spirits told him so. The others, you… None of you understand what the Terwa Lords are! What we would become, were we to ally with them… The horrors we would have to accept, to inflict… I died with every Haa-Ok life I took, but I could not allow the delegation to deliver us into a devil’s bargain for the soul of our people!”

“I do not know the Terwa Lords,” Issisk said stiffly. “I know only what you told me of them. How can I know, now, what of that is true?”

“All of it. Issisk, I swear—”

“What I know is that the blood of several Haa-Ok is on your talons. And that this was not your decision to make.

“Some day, Seyusth, the eyes of the White Leech will grow careless, and I will escape. Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps a year from now. But I will make my way home, and I will tell all Haa-Ok what you did. That it was not the wrath of the spirits that allowed an assassin to reach our shaman, but a traitor who knew his magics. And they will make their own choice, as they should have long ago.”

“Issisk, please!” It was not a word that came easily to the lizardfolk, above all a practical and pragmatic people. “Please, if your anger is with me, take it out on me. But you will be doing Haa-Ok only harm if you—”

“You have no more words I wish to hear, traitor.”

Seyusth was still pleading as his cousin disappeared through the open doorway, followed by the shambling Hasseth. If his people were capable of it, he would have wept.

It was the commotion from outside—running, howling, the thump of fists on armor as wild men worked themselves into a frenzy—that snapped him out of it a few moments later. From here, he could see absolutely nothing of what was happening. All he could tell was that it wasn’t a fire.

Which, given the rather damp state of affairs, he’d have known anyway.

The sounds faded into the distance, the night now filled with nothing but the hum of insects and the hoot of a hunting bird. And then…

“Hsst! Seyusth!”

“Issisk knows things he shouldn’t.”

Ameyanda slipped in through the doorway, carrying one of the White Leech blades. The human looked awful—her eyes were slightly wild, she winced with every step—but it seemed that most of the blood splattered across her armor and skin was not hers.

“We don’t have long,” she told him, limping across the open chamber. “I left a trail down to the water’s edge, and pushed one of the small rafts into the current. Not one with the dead who, uh, row,” she clarified. “But we have only minutes before they catch up and realize I’m not aboard.”

“Then we had better act, and discuss the details of your miraculous escape another day.”

She nodded and halted before him, examining the rough wooden cross.

“Seyusth,” she said softly, “there’s no way to do this gently, not in the time we have.”

“I understand.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “Do it.”

Even in the blackness, the room spun as she pulled the cross from the corner, twisted it clumsily, and laid it flat. He felt her fingers squeeze between his scales and the curved iron pinning his right arm; saw her flinch from the touch of the necromantic runes; heard the scrape as she braced her feet on the wood.

Wood splintered. Iron screeched. And despite his most adamant efforts, Seyusth screamed.

∗∗∗

When it was done, they lay sprawled on the floor, chests heaving, growing sticky with the lizardman’s blood. Ameyanda tried not to stare at the raw meat and exposed tendon visible through the rents in her companion’s flesh.

Especially when they began to twitch.

“They still work well enough…” he muttered. His arm shaking, he reached a hand out to the huntress’s shoulder.

“Seyusth…”

But he was already speaking in his own reptilian tongue.

Ameyanda gasped as an icy shock ran down her arm, as though someone had replaced her blood with mountain runoff. It faded swiftly, however, and so too did much of the agony in her hand.

Not all—and it still burned with a sickly heat—but any relief was welcome.

“Tomorrow,” the shaman said softly, “I can cure the infection. I fear you will have to bear it until then.”

“Thank you. I—”

Again he spoke in his own language, and the worst of his wounds began to close over. Much like her own, it was far from a complete cure, but impressive for all that.

“What of Issisk?” she asked, staggering roughly to her feet.

Seyusth’s face went tight, as though he’d only just remembered why they’d come.

“He is here. He… ran into the swamp when the commotion began. I must find him before they do.”

“Wait just a—”

The shaman staggered through the door, shifting into some sort of ibis, and took to the night skies.

“Grandfather Gozreh damn that lizard! I should—”

The thump-squelch of ponderous footsteps in the mud, and a high-pitched wheezing of animal fury, announced that her time had run out.

They announced, too, who approached.

The room was empty, save for the broken cross. Nowhere to hide. And even after Seyusth’s curative magics, Ameyanda didn’t think she had it in her to face the Gullet directly.

Her frantic gaze alighted upon the shaman’s blood, only just beginning to seep into the saturated wooden floor. With no other choice, she dropped to her knees and began to arrange things just so…

A grunt as he came through the door, a faint creak of wood beneath his feet. She knew what the walking avalanche of flesh must see: Her body, lying crumpled in the midst of a sizable blood pool, her stolen weapon lying beside her. Using techniques she’d learned long ago to avoid the sensitive ears of prey and predator both, she breathed lightly, softly. In the feeble lighting, it should appear she didn’t breathe at all.

She hoped.

“Well, haven’t you been trouble?” the high, breathy voice asked from behind. “Not as ripe as I’d like, but you’ll still taste fine. And more of you to go around, with fewer mouths to feed.”

She felt flabby fingers close around an ankle, lift in preparation to drag her from the room…

Ameyanda rolled upright, stomach muscles screaming, and struck. The iron spike that had nailed Seyusth’s feet to the cross now plunged through Galgur’s own. The lumbering giant shrieked, a sound almost too high to hear, and crumpled, grasping reflexively at the sudden agony.

The huntress’s other hand, clutching one of the sharpened brackets that had held the shaman’s arms, punched between those toothy ridges and down that screaming gullet. She felt things tear around her makeshift weapon, the skin of his throat quivering obscenely at the touch of the thing’s vile magics.

“How does that taste, you motherless hyena?”

Galgur managed a single, wet choke. Blood bubbled up around Ameyanda’s hand, and she yanked it back, leaving the cursed bracket behind.

The room shook as the Gullet’s body rolled to the floor. Ameyanda decided to believe that her brief gasp was a result of that shuddering, and not a near-sob of relief at the creature’s death.

All right, now what?

She had no idea of how quickly the others would return, and she’d never find her way out of here wounded, in the dark, without Seyusth. So what could she possibly…

Ameyanda studied the massive corpse, then the blade on the floor beside the puddle of blood, and heaved a thick sigh. In a day of sickening tasks, what’s one more?

At least now she had somewhere to hide…

∗∗∗

“I knew you would run.”

Seyusth dropped through the branches, shifting out of bird-form as he landed with a muddy thump. “After what you told me, I knew you would see the sudden commotion as your opportunity. Perhaps even a gift from the spirits.”

Issisk straightened, hand hovering near the blade at his belt. “What do you intend?”

“Issisk, please. I will help you get home, and submit myself to whatever penance you see fit, but do not tell the others! Their belief may be all that keeps us from the Terwa!”

“I am not you, Seyusth. I will not deceive our people. I will let them make their own choice. And where Hasseth and the others were tribesmates, I am family. I do not believe you would murder me to keep your secret.”

Seyusth lowered his gaze, and Issisk turned to walk away.

∗∗∗

For several days they traveled. They rested as well as they could, in the best shelters they could find, and said little. Finally, they awoke one morning to the welcome sight of the Mwangi jungles against the eastern horizon.

Ameyanda rose, stretched, preparing herself for another day’s hike. She eyed the rough blade she carried with distaste and more than a little sadness. Those mambeles had been her trusted companions for years. She could acquire new ones readily enough, but it wouldn’t be the same.

Seyusth appeared beside her, also ready for travel—and apparently still digesting what she’d told him over breakfast.

“You really hid inside—”

She shuddered with the memory of the charnel stench, the wet coils looping around her arms, the hot, reeking fat closing in around her. “It worked. And I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I understand.”

“And Issisk?” She hadn’t planned to ask; the fact that Seyusth had returned alone was evidence enough of the lizardman’s fate. The question just burst out in response to the unwanted imagery he’d inflicted on her with his own comment, however unintended.

“The White Leech reached him before I did,” Seyusth’s attention fixed on the distant jungle. “I was unable to save him.”

“So this was all for nothing.”

“I… fear so.”

Ameyanda growled and started walking—then stopped once more when she realized the lizardman was still behind her.

“Isn’t this about where you turn north, if you’re returning to Haa-Ok?”

“I am not returning yet. I owe you—”

“No, we’re even. I was repaying a debt.”

“Yes, you accompanied me as repayment. But then you saved me, when it would have been wiser to make your own escape from the White Leech.”

“I’m not keeping count. And I have my own tasks, Seyusth.”

“And I will assist you.”

“You owe me nothing, shaman. Go home.”

The huntress began to walk once more, and this time she did not look back.

∗∗∗

“Go home.”

It sounded nice enough. But Seyusth wasn’t certain he had a home any longer. The visage of every relative would be Issisk’s dying face; every glance, his eyes; every raised voice, an accusation.

Issisk had been right. He’d felt guilt before, but not until it was one of his own family had he felt like a traitor.

Seyusth had meant to save Issisk, he truly had. But the tribe must be protected. Haa-Ok was safe. The people still believed the spirits disapproved of the Terwa Lords. They were in no danger of losing their identity, their culture, their souls to those monsters. And Seyusth’s own apprentice could serve their spiritual and mystical needs for many moons to come.

I can do more good here. Allies among the humans will prove useful, someday, when the Terwa do come to Mwangi.

So he told himself again, and again, in the hopes that he would start believe. Because responsibility was easier to bear than guilt.

Seyusth sighed a very human sigh, and set off after his distant companion.